There's not really any conceivable way to do any such thing, nor any purpose which would be best served by it, and other side effects of that much energy expenditure would be of far more immediate concern. If my math is right, the energy required to move Mars to Earth orbit would be about 20x its gravitational binding energy. You probably don't want to just give it a big whack, and the list of things that would probably be easier would probably include disassembling the planet and moving it to a new orbit piecemeal.

It's always funny when one of you gets up on your hind legs and pretends to know something about this subject. The Earth is a very complex system, but take a look at it from 200km altitude in the IR band, and a very simple picture emerges. Either CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and increasing the concentration must raise the global temperature, or you have to find a new way to transfer heat to space and explain why this was not previously observed and explain why the observed temperatures are increasing anyway. Then explain why this phenomenon is also not observed in the atmospheres of Mars, Venus, or the Sun.

The theory of AGW was first published in 1896; it's older and better-established than Relativity. It's nice that you have some vague mudslinging to display, but I think that if you want to claim some vast ignorance of climate science, you should probably speak only for yourself.

Venus begs to differ. Or are you suggesting that CO2 has no effect at all in the atmosphere?

You should probably be aware of the reasons for the introduction of cgroups, the limitations of pidfiles with respect to process tracking, and the difficulties involved in setting resource limits for processes without kernel-level support. There may or may not be anything too badly wrong with systemd (hopefully not, as OpenRC is pretty similar), but people who are still clinging to sysvinit are fools.

So if science can't determine whether something is harmless in an absolute sense, maybe it doesn't try to make sense to insist on that being the relevant qualification. Maybe there's a more reasonable definition of 'harmless'. That would probably save us some pedantic sophistry.

You're defending a specious point presumably because you skipped the part where I didn't disagree with your conclusion. You are quite wrong about the lesser claim, and quite correct about GMO safety.

You can argue whether the government's position on tobacco and lead represented scientific consensus, but the CO2 story is unequivocal. Arrhenius published his theory of CO2-induced climate change in 1896, and Angstrom refuted it convincingly five years later. Over the subsequent five decades the foundations for the refutation were overturned, but you can find textbooks as late as 1950 which explicitly assign a minimal climatic role to atmospheric CO2.

Science got CO2 flat-out wrong. The lead, sugar, and tobacco industries all spread malicious and harmful science via the government, and poisoned Americans for decades. There are good reasons to believe that this is not true of GMOs, but science is far from infallible.

That's wonderful, but not the point of contention. There was valid science suggesting that these things were harmless. In the case of AGW there were several reasons to believe that CO2-induced climate change was impossible, which stood unchallenged for decades. Clearly that situation has changed, and again, this has nothing to do with the original claim that GMOs are safe, or whether lead, sugar, tobacco, or CO2 are actually harmful. However, while there are at best a handful of cases where the scientific process went awry, and while the majority of those involved private industry poisoning the well, there idea that science has never misidentified a harmful substance is not tenable.

As it happens, the "chequered history" of AGW is extremely useful as a way to shut up anti-AGW conspiracy theorists. It's kinda hard to sustain a story of scientific conspiracy that starts with the theory being disproved.

The CO2 theory of climate change was disproved by Angstrom in 1901, and not revived for fifty years. Callendar 1949 gives an overview of what it calls the theory's "chequered history". CFCs were used for decades before their effects in the upper atmosphere became known, and even Lovelock's initial discovery vindicated them. For lead you should refer to the Wikipedia articles on the subject of TEL, Robert Kehoe, and Clair Patterson. Probably Thomas Midgely's promotional efforts are relevant to both of those stories. Sugar, lead, and tobacco are all good examples of industries which swindled the government and the American public for decades based on bogus studies; the tobacco companies are particularly infamous for this. I'm not sure why your idea of science is so fragile that it can't be wrong occasionally.

If you're not on the revisionist side of the argument, why don't you pipe down? Holocaust denial does not deserve some sort of rigorous disproof. Being shouted down in public is their least deserts; they're lucky that such speech isn't criminal.

CO2, Tetraethyl lead and lead in general, CFCs, Thalidomide, and perhaps cigarettes. It's a short list, and doesn't actually refute overall point, but yes, there have been a few fairly serious scientific errors in the past.

EMP pulse, ATM machine, HIV virus, PIN number, MSDS sheet, NIC card, IRA account, ISBN number, LCD display, PDF format, SPF factor, AC current. English does this, deal with it.

Why would you ever use eval in Ruby?

On the other hand, the idea of completely changing your surroundings isn't inherently bad. I did more or less as they describe, I was horribly depressed, moved to a third-world country, and had to survive on my wits. It's certainly a way to have different problems.

Nobody will ensure the "purity" of Linux, because that's what the GPL does. I'm not sure what specific FUD you're trying to imply with the EEE remarks, but the evidence for chicanery is pretty weak, and you're sort of pointing out that they aren't that effective at it.

And not to defend Microsoft, but .NET is better than Java in most respects, and Java's popularity has been propped up by Android. I'm not sure where .NET is headed, but Kotlin is likely to start cutting into Java on mobile in a big way.

That's exactly what Microsoft does. They have a guaranteed revenue stream, and they've been trying to convert that into dominant positions in various other related industries. They've had success with the console market after burning an insane amount of money, they've failed repeatedly in the phone market after burning even more money, and it seems like they're achieving a pretty comfortable position in the tablet market. Microsoft can certainly afford to hire all of the talent that they want, and they actually do not want for qualified engineers. Also, this is not exactly novel ground here, it's the exact same type of work that was done to create WSL. Money may not solve every problem in the world, but it's actually a pretty effective way to get things done, and there's no reason to believe that this would be an exception.